What a change in the Scene's ownership means for the paper's future - and the city's

What a difference a decade makes. When the Nashville Scene first experienced out-of-town ownership by the Village Voice Media (VVM) chain in 2000, investors were treating alternative weekly papers as solid bets with reliable revenue and cash flow. A New York Times story at the time referred to alt-weeklies like the Scene as "reservoirs of value."Today's alt-weeklies, along with the rest of the newspaper industry, are coping with declining ad revenue, shrinking staffs, dwindling print readership and a financially murky digital future. For the Scene, those murky waters will now be navigated by local owners. After nine years in chains, the Scene has returned to local control with VVM's sale of the paper last month to Nashville-based SouthComm.

Created in 2007 by former Scene publisher Chris Ferrell, SouthComm also owns The City Paper, the subscription-based business news site NashvillePost.com, and a smattering of smaller print publications catering to specific audiences (including Her Nashville, Music Row, and Business Tennessee). SouthComm's portfolio also includes Louisville's alt-weekly paper LEO Weekly as well as some medical newsletters and two custom publishing businesses.

Buying the Scene, which CEO Ferrell says he's been trying to do since he left it in 2007, fits a theory of media enterprise that Ferrell has been cultivating at SouthComm. The demise of classified print advertising and declining subscriptions are crushing daily dead-tree journalism, but Ferrell is convinced it's not the death of all print journalism. Sensing unmet reader demand for local news and commercial demand for local advertising vehicles, Ferrell wants to mix real-time news provided online with longer-form content delivered in print publications geared to niche audiences.

Part of the logic lies in efficiencies achieved through staff integration. Since the deal went down on Aug. 21, the Scene's editorial staff has moved out to Grassmere to bond with scribes at The City Paper and NashvillePost.com, while sales and finance types have taken up group residence in the former Scene digs in the Gulch. As with all mergers, efficiencies for some mean pink slips for others: four SouthComm employees and 12 Scenesters ended up on the outside looking in.

Does Ferrell's blend of publications in a single market hold water as a profitable local media model for the future? It's a unique model, but so far an untested one. The trend in media mergers has been to collect similar publications across markets, cloning, say, alt-weeklies or business journals in multiple cities. Ferrell's approach favors within-market bundles over a single niche chained across markets.

The Scene acquisition completes SouthComm's tableau for Nashville—the alpha test of Ferrell's theory. Ownership of LEO Weekly signals that Louisville will be the beta test. Ferrell confirms that SouthComm is looking to buy in Louisville, where LEO's editor Stephen George told me he's "very interested to see what happens in Nashville."

SouthComm corporate strategy aside, a more pressing question is how liberation from the VVM chain will affect the Scene itself. When owners Bruce Dobie and Albie Del Favero first put the Scene inside newly created VVM in 2000, the paper changed little because VVM was more interested in financial than editorial control. VVM "brought a cultural and intellectual adherence to advocacy journalism" of the kind the Scene was doing, recalls Dobie, who continued as editor until Liz Garrigan took over in 2004.

More noticeable change came in 2006 after VVM's six papers merged with the New Times chain of 11 alt-weeklies. Although the combined chain took the VVM name, it was the New Times approach that prevailed and reoriented the Scene's editorial vibe.

The marriage between the Scene and the new VVM was tricky. The Scene was unusual for alt-weeklies, with a broader demographic and a meaningful role in city affairs. "Its reach and influence here ran circles around virtually all of its counterparts across the country," says Garrigan, "and while the New Times/VVM folks had many virtues, I'm not sure they ever really appreciated or understood the role of this storied institution and how rooted it was."

The new VVM—"the Gannett of the alt-weekly world," quips former Scene media critic Henry Walker—wanted its papers to ditch community journalism and advocacy in favor of racier cover stories appealing to a younger demographic. (The average Scene reader is 42.) Arts coverage shifted, with more reliance on syndicated content and limits on acceptable areas of reporting and criticism. VVM wanted the book page gone, but Garrigan persuaded her corporate overlords to let her keep it.

When Garrigan left in mid-2008, VVM replaced her with Pete Kotz, an out-of-town guy who had run a New Times paper in Cleveland. Under Kotz, the writers got younger and the content grew edgier in tone, especially online where VVM mandated frequent injections of fresh material. The Scene's three blogs, Pith in the Wind (news and media), Bites (food) and Cream (music), attracted more traffic. Meanwhile, driven by both VVM's priorities and shrinking page counts in a horrible economy, the news hole in the front of the paper largely evaporated.

Some longtime readers found these shifts jarring. Political media consultant Bill Fletcher says the Scene "doesn't seem quite as relevant and quite as vital," in part because of "an aggressive frat-house vibe" that mutes its impact. Veteran political analyst Pat Nolan hopes the Scene regains its influential presence in the community, joking that "I used to pick up the Scene so that I knew what to think."